Robot on the Ice

1 We stood on a giant ice field about 1,000 miles from the South Pole. We were surrounded by blowing snow, with nothing in sight but a few crates of supplies and a robot.

2. First things first—we started putting up tents

4 We had come to see if our robot could find meteorites—rocks that have fallen toEarth from space.

5 Meteorites are important to NASA because they can tell us more about what is in space. Some were blasted off the surface of Mars long ago by asteroids They have given us clues about the red planet. Even older meteorites hold dues about the birth of the solar system.

6 We needed to come to this faraway place because Antarctica is the best place to find meteorites, When space rocks fall on Antarctic ice fields, snow covers them As the icefields creep toward the ocean, some of them run into hills and mountains. There the ice stops,

and the wind blows away the top layers of snow. The buried meteorites then come to the surface, where they can be found.

7 A few people come to Antarctica every summer to hunt for meteorites, but searching on the ice is cold and tiring. Even in the summer, the temperature can feel like forty degrees below zero.

8 We were not typical meteorite hunters, though, We had a robot. We would stay in a heated tent and "talk" to the robot through our computers while the robot searched on the ice more than a mile away,

9 We called our robot Nomad. We had designed it to explore remote places, just as a space robot explores other planets. Nomad had to be able to travel over rough ground and drive for long distances. It had to be able to look around, study objects that we had programmed it to look for, and send its information back to humans. So we gave Nomad a sturdy frame, four wheels, lots of sensors and computers, and wireless access so that humans could communicate with it

10. Nomad had already explored a desert in South America, but before we went to Antarctica we had to make some changes. We added heaters to keep the computers and sensors warm, and we added studs to the tires so Nomad could move on the ice without slipping.

11

After setting up our tents, we went to work on our robot. It had traveled from the coast hanging under a helicopter, so we had taken off all the fragile parts before the trip. Now we put them all back on: cameras and a laser to help the robot see, and a sensor called a spectrometer.